Just like almost everyone there is a part of me that is terrified by and hates nukes! When Yankee Rowe (spelling?) was dismantled I watched in interest. A friend lives near there ontop of a small mountain. He was never sick but other people he knew and knew of where sick from strange cancers just downstream. Yankee was a safe plant without leakage issues or so we were told. But my friend and others ontop of the ridge were fine but others in the valley downstream from the reactor and runoff were ill, some died. If this plant design and others are naturally safe I.E. they are naturally cool and wont meltdown if left to it and are more safely enclosed then it worth a look. The enormous damage from climate change forces us to look everywhere to save us from our collective selves. Lets just hope there is a "SAFE" nuke to help after the analysis is done. We MUST do some distastefull things to avert disaster from warming. Maybe a actuall full suit tidal, wave, wind, geothermal, sun, biomass, etc. as well as high tech gizmos will do. My vote do all the god given and use the rest as only filler.

It is the waste that remains harmful for such a long time that I am concerned about. Some want to reprocess the fuel rods, get more energy and be left with plutonium. Since a gram of plutonium can kill a person and you can make bombs from it, I don't think that is such a good idea either.

SJC have you been to www.startech.net? They have a plasma process that breaks down nuke waste into basically glass. It is still HOT, but nonleachable, nonporus, and easy to store. I agree the idea of huge volumes a awfull waste for generations to come is dumb. The only problem is energy demand by society! It's OK to send our children to kill and be killed, rape and poison the earth and leave enormous problems for future generations to come, for oil. It's sad! SJC maybe megatonnes to megawatts and other programs to store waste in remote an safe sites will be seen 50 years from now as an attempt to solve other greater (whole earth) problems. It's ugly what we do for progress but how do we power society? Maybe nukes are a necessary evil. My heart is with you on this one!

Gen III reactors...why are we building them anyway? Many Gen 4 reactors are both safer and more efficient. Some are even meltdown proof. A modified Integral Fast Reactor (w/ fuel recycling under IAEA safeguards) could solve many nuclear waste problems. A properly shielded gas cooled version may utilise 1,700C+ temp reactors, making it far more efficient (50-60% vs ~38%).

It is fine to seek NRC approval of vendor designs, but the bottom line is that no one is going to build a commercial nuclear power generating station in the USA until the federal government actually opens a long term storage facility.

Van: I wouldn't be so sure. There is already talk of a few new nukes being built in Texas and the US South East in the coming years, and Yucca Mountain isn't set to open until 2017.

I wish America would stop treating the nuclear waste and plant decommissioning nightmares as separate issues from the generating of electricity via nuclear power. We have an enormous amount of nuclear waste piling up at plants all over the country, yet that part of the equation is almost always overlooked. (At least until I get into the conversation...)

If energy conservation was fully implemented, the need for more coal and nuke power plants could be greatly reduced.

Ten years ago we moved from a 65 KWh/day all electric home to a 37 KWh/day all electric place = 43% energy saving.

Next year we will do better. Our new all electric place will be better built, better windows and doors, an efficient heat recovery system, a very high efficiency 22-SEER Heat pump/Air conditioner system, more efficient appliances, florescent lights every where, more efficient LCD TVs, new low power PCs (the power supplies of the current large PCs are only 25% efficient) etc. We expect to reduce energy consumption by another 32.5%, from 37 KWh/day to less than 25 KWh/day.

By moving twice, our home energy consumption will go down by 61.5% Total net cost = a profit of about 2 x $125 000 or enough to buy our first 4 PHEVs.

The 40 KWh/day saving is enough to run 2 PHEVs/EVs (about 160 Km/day) free without a single extra KWh from the power grid.

By replacing our ICE vehicles with two PHEVs (hopefully in 2008/09) we will reduce liquid fossil fuel consumption from more than 10 L/day to less than 2 L/day. The new garage will be equipped with 115 VAC/220 VAC outlets to recharge the PHEVs.

I still haven't heard of a nuclear plant capable of sustaining multiple jetliner crashes. In the post 9/11 world, that should be a major concern on everyone's mind.

Erick,
Screw airliners, the real design parameters will include:
a) 2,000lb/1,000kg bombs deliverd via small kamikaze jets, or one large airliner/freighter. Remember Osirak?
_Modified SS-N-2 Styx or CSS-N-2 Silkworm ASM missiles have half ton shaped charge warheads (may be replaced w/a AP of similar mass/dimensions), and also pose a threat. During the invasion phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), modified Styx or Silkworms were modified for short range LACM work. The Patriot batteries were not effective against their low alt. attack profiles. Using a laptop and some other equipment available to civilians, it can attack facilities, like a nuke plant. Not all the war material of Saddam's military have been recovered. This includes missiles of various types.
b) major earthquakes, esp. in soil conditions that readily liquify under seismic loads. This would include most of the middle/lower Mississippi and Ohio River valleys and parts of the Southeast. They are also potential areas for large seismic events.

4th Gen. Nuclear Plants will burn the other 95% of nuclear fuel not burned up by 3rd Gen. Nuclear Plants. France and Russia both already reprocess their nuclear waste and the USA will do so in the future. The remaining nuclear waste only needs to be stored for about 500 years at Yucca Mt. before it’s no longer a heath issue. And please stop with the long sad story about some future terror group planing on destroying a nuclear plant or nuclear waste store area – It isn’t going to ever happen! We have more than enough nuclear fuel to produce all of our electricity for 100s if not 1000s of years, if properly managed. We could shut down all of our fossil fuel power plants within 20-30 years if our national leaders did their jobs for a change. And this would go along way towards reducing our national GHG emissions.

One of the real problems when discussing future energy sources is that most public and pundits don't understand our present sources very well - and that includes nukes. If you'd like an entertaining quick course in nuclear power that covers the good and the bad (plenty of both) and will provide you with a sense of perspective going into the future, see the novel "Rad Decision" at my blog site RadDecision.blogspot.com. I've worked in nuclear over twenty years. The book is free to readers - who seem to like it, judging by their comments. Also endorsed by Stewart Brand, founder of The Whole Earth Catalog.

Harvey,

It isn't just you. To a much smaller extent, all homes in the US are using less energy now (per home) then they were at any time in the last ~25 years. I'm burning about 10kw-hrs in the summer and 20 in the winter per day.

There are no "huge volumes" of waste. All of the high-level (fuel) waste ever produced by all power reactors would fit piled up on a football field; the same volume of coal would not keep one coal fired power plant running for a week. And the great majority of waste produced by existing reactors can be used as fuel by more advanced reactors.

The real problem with nuclear power is that there is not enough easily available uranium, radium and thorium to meet all of humanity's energy needs at a Western standard of living for more than a few hundred years. Barring some completely new technology such as neutron-free fusion the only large-scale permanent energy source known is Solar power satellites in Earth orbit. Nuclear fission will be a crucial temporary solution; future generations will curse us for not transitioning with all deliberate speed from fossil to nuclear power.

Harvey D, I'm with you!

Stuff like that is the equivalent of doubling the efficiency of electricity power plants. Or having half as many of them!

Speaking of which, why do we hear so little of WOW-energies propane cycle based waste-heat extraction that bumps coal generation from 30% to 60% efficient? It uses off-the-shelf components too for simple retrofit. Should be mandatory for all new powerplant developments if it works in my opinion.

http://www.wowenergies.com/pages/2/index.htm

Yes, nuclear plants produce a fraction of the waste by volume or weight that coal burners produce. So future generation should come from wind and nuclear, and the coal burners phased out. But we are not building wind farms because they are eye sores, so the NIMBY folks are blocking them. The courts have allowed NIMBY lawsuits to block Yucca mountain, and so we are prevented from taking a strategic step in the war on terror by building enough nukes to charge all the PHEV's necessary to stop buying oil from our enemies.

In the 1930's we found that many of the organizations blocking efforts to prepare for the defense of America were funded by foreign powers, so the question we must ask ourselves is where does the money come from that funds the NIMBY's.

Actauly a nuke plant can take agreat many direct hits by any airliner built today. An airplane is actauly a very squishy thing. and to get into the reactor a plant would have to target a ery low to th ground spot and break through many reinforced concrete walls. Some VERY thick indeed. Remember the ONLY reason the pentagon took any damage at all was the windows..nuke plants dont have windows.

Patrick:

If individual homes are using 50% less energy than before, why is the total energy used in our homes going up? Could it be that energy conservation is NOT as wide spread as we think.

As far as USA cars + guzzlers go, we all know that the mpg has not really changed in the last 30 years. A 50% improvement would mean an average of 40+ mpg instead of the current 20- mpg. Here too, energy conservation is the exception.

We could all have an equivalent or better standard of living by using half as much liquid fuel and half as much gaz and electricity. Most Europeans do it.

Consumming less energy (-50%) may not be the American way of doing things, but is the quickest and easiest way to reduce OIL imports and trade deficits, reduce GHG, raise our standards of living and our well being in general.

Much more efforts should be directed towards energy conservation and the production of clean electrical energy.
New refineries and more coal or nuclear power plants would not be required if demand is not there.

Van,
D'BAE (Don't Build Anything, Ever), add that to NIMBY.
_Seriously, many farmers near cities/metro areas are feeeling the pinch from ever higher property values (thus property taxes). They can use the $5,000 to $10,000 per annum in royalties from the electric utilities.
_Another point is thta the US govt. pays farmers not to plant crops on plots of land for soil/water conservation purposes. Some farmers, due to higher prices for grains, are ditching this. Perhaps one way to slow this is to kill corn/soy subsidies, and allow farmers to have wind turbines install on their properties. It could also be easier to string HVDC, or 3-Phase HVAC through the Midwest.

Energy consumption keeps going up because the old, inefficient stuff is still used and we keep letting immigrants in.

A friend of mine said we need to invest far more into conservation.. towich I said... Nope . We need to do everything. We are already working quite hard on the conseration side we however arnt working hard enough on new and better power plants.

If we had been doing a proper job of it we would already have type 7 nuke plants and all our nuke waste issues wouldnt exist. If we had been doing a proper job all the coal plants around would have been allowed to upgrade as they copuld afford to do so and wouldnt instead be running on 50 year old tech and duct tape.

If we had been doing a proper job we already would have gone much father past the break even point on fusion power and yes might even have had a power plant by now.

If we had been doing a proper job we wouldnt have so many people in america right now and would have had a hell of alot more money to work on upgrading everything.

If we had been doing a proper job we would have just blown saddam up and warned the middle east they were all next if they so much as looked sidways at oil supplies.

If we had done a proper job we prolly would have found some amazingly brilliant way to wipe ourselves out by now..

But we arnt doing a proper job... and thank god for that.

I posted this on my blog September 1, 2001--no, that's not a typo:

YUCCA MOUNTAIN CLOSER TO BECOMING NUCLEAR WASTE SITE

It's a little known fact that America's nuclear plants have nowhere to put their spent fuel. So it's been piling up in boron-filled waste fuel pools at the plants themselves for as long as 40 years. These spent fuel rods represent a terrible danger, were a plant to ever explode or be attacked by terrorists. They also have to be carefully monitored to ensure they never reach criticality (the point of a runaway reaction). They vastly increase, by 50 to 100 times, the amount of radioactivity that could potentially be released into the environment. Development of a suitable national waste site has been hampered by legal red tape and environmental concerns since the Carter presidency. But the paradox is that instead of burying it in the desert, in stable geological formations, the poisonous fuel continues to be stored above ground near population centers. Talk about an environmental strategy that's backfired! We can't figure out what to do, environmentalists fight every move the govenment makes, so we just leave the stuff near the most populated areas of the country where it could do the most harm! The Energy Department has finally released a preliminary report approving the Yucca Mountain site in the Nevada desert. It must now pass Congress. Let's hope the politicians get their act together and remove these poisons from our cities before a mishap makes us wish we had.

So much ignorance on nuclear power...

With an estimated 10^9 tons of uranium in ore grades greater than 20ppm (energy cutoff calculated in 1975 by Chapman) theres enough fuel to run 20000 light water reactors for 25000 years minimum on the once through fuel cycle. Use thorium breeder reactors and that easily stretches into the hundreds of millions of years.

Nuclear waste itself is a political problem only. Get rid of Yucca mountain and encourage on site above ground dry storage rather than charging the utilities for a service they'll never use. It will last a good couple of centuries, certainly long enough for us to come up with a better solution for nuclear waste, which I can assure includes processing for fuel and fission platenoids.

Harvey,

I said to a much smaller extent. I believe it is more on the order of a 20% reduction in energy usage in the residential sector per house now as compared to ~25 years ago.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/pdf/pages/sec2_4.pdf

Look at the column for "primary residences" and you will see the power consumed is fairly constant. Total households consumption is increasing due to further sprawl causing more losses in electricity transmission from the generation sources as is evident here:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/pdf/pages/sec2_5.pdf

This shows the energy consumption per household on average:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/pdf/pages/sec2_15.pdf

Andy wrote:

He was never sick but other people he knew and knew of where sick from strange cancers just downstream.

Andy, there is very little chance that any of that was due to the nuclear plant. There's something like a 1 in 3 chance that each of us will die of cancer, and many of those deaths will be from the large variety of unusual cancer types. Against that background, the rate of cancers from natural radiation, never mind the much lower dose from commercial nuclear activities, is not detectable.

"There's something like a 1 in 3 chance that each of us will die of cancer"

It's actually more like 1 in 5, at least in the United States. It's also a slightly lower chance for women than men.

http://seer.cancer.gov/faststats/sites.php?site=All+Cancer+Sites&stat=Lifetime+Risk